Be sure to include your name, daytime phone number, address, name and phone number of legal next-of-kin, method of payment, and the name of the funeral home/crematory to contact for verification of death.

Moral obligation, KC streetcar plan, hookah bars

Few would disagree that more adherence to this basic guide for human interaction would minimize problems that have to do with skin color, class (socioeconomic level) and crime.

Skin color is a more accurate concept for discussing what is often referred to as race.

Beyond clothing, a major item that our vision allows us to recognize about another human being is skin color.

Just as we can be taught to react positively or negatively toward types of clothing, we can be conditioned about skin color.

But what if an individual’s experiences include that a disproportionately large number of persons within a certain range of skin colors or socio-economic levels (or even types of clothing worn) engage in criminal behavior? Would this at the least justify mental alertness?

Mental alertness is a natural aspect of perception.

But it should be tempered with the knowledge that the majority of all-inclusive generalizations are false.

One has a right to be alert and even to be cautious. One also has a moral obligation to do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Eddie J. Thomas

WichitaKC streetcar plan

Our city officials have done it to us again. The light rail for downtown will be paid for with a tax from the downtown people.

Now Kansas City manager Troy Schulte says $2 million from the transportation tax money will go to the light rail.

When will our people downtown tell us the real truth when they try to get money to fund a project like the light rail?

I knew that when they said it would be funded by the people downtown it was a bunch of baloney (I don’t like the word liar) to get what they wanted. What a bunch of people we have running our city.

Kenneth Langley

Kansas CityKC hookah bars

What the tobacco industry spends on marketing with the goal of enticing new smokers every day, The Kansas City Star accomplished in one day through its article glamorizing hookah bars (10-8, D1, “Smokin’ city”).

Although the days of blatantly targeting young people through ploys like Joe Camel are gone, the more sophisticated 21st century approach of promoting flavored tobacco as found in hookah bars has the same target — our children.

The vessel may be new, but the health outcome is the same old, same old. Tobacco, in any form, is dangerous to the user and dangerous for those in proximity to the user via secondhand smoke.

The research is clear. Most tobacco users begin the habit by the time they are 18 and are greatly influenced by their peers.

By promoting the use of hookah bars as a cultural experience, complete with photos of students partaking and doing everything except drawing a map to area hookah bars, The Star is an accomplice to an industry that has preyed on our children for decades.

Tracy Russell

Overland ParkMissouri socialism

Tort reform is simply socialism.

Yet, Republican lawmakers are forcing socialism on Missourians by making it law that the state can tell you how much money you can make and making it illegal for you to make any more.

Democracy and capitalism may be messy, but that does not mean that Republican lawmakers can simply suspend them because someone powerful does not like them in certain cases. Such state interference in the private sector is socialism not tort reform.

Arthur Basler

Lee’s SummitCongressional hopes

I am giving thought to running for a seat in the House of Representatives. I am very good at doing nothing.

Bill Betteridge

IndependenceRepairing Congress

OK. It’s time. We need to draft rules for the House and Senate via constitutional amendment.

Come on. It only takes one state to start the process.

Let’s not let these adolescents continue to play with people’s livelihoods, costing all American taxpayers more in the end. This is ridiculous.

The Supreme Court decided to end the George W. Bush-Al Gore election indecision quickly because all impasses must end.

It is time for the populace to change the system and not allow these fools to continue to impede the legislative process.

We have the power to do so.

Lisa Blain

Kansas City, Kan.U.S. gun violence

So the United States is now part of the third world — a place too dangerous for other Westerners to visit. A place a former deputy prime minister of Australia urges other Australians to avoid.

I don’t blame him. Until we are ready as a society to address not just the issue of guns, which badly needs addressing, but also why teens and young adults think it is OK to kill other people out of boredom, I wouldn’t visit the U.S. either.

If we don’t get gun violence under control, we are not going to need to worry about Blue Cross Blue Shield targeting obesity because many are going to die before the complications of obesity set in.

Sandra Stevenson

BeltonControlling governor

When all three branches of government — executive, legislative and judicial — are controlled by one person, it’s called a dictatorship.

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